The traditional style crown molding I installed in this boy’s room, complete with these toy airplanes hanging from the ceiling, is a classic design that’s an appropriate style for the majority of homes in North America.

But I warn you, crown molding is the gateway drug to the permanent condition of wanting to upgrade all the moldings in your home, once you see a nice three-piece crown molding like this one installed in your very own home!

Your dining room can be set apart from the rest of the open floor plan with wainscoting.

This is the dining room/kitchen of a typical, early 1970’s style ranch home.

The challenge decorating this kind of open floor plan is: how do you decorate in such a way as to set the “dining room” area apart from the utility part of the kitchen without loosing the unity of the open floor plan?

Everything you put in your niche — flower, statues, found-art objects — will look prettier when they are framed with moldings!

They are so easy to decorate with some simple moldings from your local lumber yard, and are especially suited for adding a few ornate architectural details, like this one.

The trick to decorating a wall niche with moldings is to treat it like a window surround. The only thing extra I added to this one that you wouldn’t add to a window surround is the 3-1/2″ tall baseboard molding on the bottom inside.

If the paint job the painters did on this hallway wasn’t so sloppy, I would have taken pictures of the finished niche.

This was the first and last stain-grade molding project I ever installed — oak wainscoting on a split-level staircase.

All of the these pictures show the wainscoting I installed before it was stained and sealed by some very talented painters. When they were finished, it matched the old oak baseboard and wainscoting perfectly.